‘Miles? Good grief, no!’
‘Then it has to be Toby Denton, the guy who’s occupying your desk, driving your car. Did he get a hat-trick?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Did he break your heart, too?’
‘Oh... No...’ She shook her head. ‘We didn’t have that kind of a relationship.’
‘What was it like?’
‘A bit like a starter home,’ she said. ‘Something you know you’re going to grow out of sooner rather than later. I was too busy for anything serious and, while he might look like perfect boyfriend material, there aren’t many women who will play second fiddle to a rugby ball. The occasional night out, plus one do, sleepover suited us both.’
‘Colleagues with benefits? It was still a betrayal.’
‘Yes.’ Worse, she would never know whether it had been a spur-of-the-moment thing or planned from the start and she had been duped, taken for a fool.
‘Well, thanks for the vote of confidence,’ he said after a moment, ‘but sitting isn’t a pleasure. It’s uncomfortable, tedious, muscle-aching work. And you’re right. Business and pleasure is a bad combination. Good models are hard to find, which is why I don’t complicate the relationship with sex.’
‘Does that mean...’ She stopped. Of course it did. He’d just said so. Which was good. Really good. ‘Can I see?’ she asked, holding out her hand for the sketch pad, no longer so knicker-wettingly eager to get her kit off. ‘What you’ve drawn?’
He handed it over without a word and she studied the small details he’d put down with little more than the stroke of a pencil.
Her mouth, fuller, sexier than she’d ever seen in the mirror when she’d grabbed a second to slide lipstick over it. The curve of her neck emerging from her collar, the line of her leg, her skirt stretched across her backside as she’d bent to search the fridge for milk—it was definitely time to get on the treadmill. Her eyes, giving away the feelings that vibrated through her whenever she looked at him.
‘I understand why some primitive people thought the camera stole away their soul,’ she said, shaken by what he’d seen in those few moments, fixed on paper with so few lines. How much more would he see if he was being serious? She would be utterly exposed—and not just because she’d be stripped to her skin. ‘It’s not what I was expecting.’
Darius leaned back against the stepladder, folding his arms. ‘Did you imagine I was drawing your internal organs?’
She swallowed, managed a wry smile. ‘Well, that is more your style. This is just me.’
‘What’s on the surface. The image you show the world. I’ll go deeper.’
‘You won’t find much muscle definition,’ she warned him.
‘You have a lot of everything, Natasha.’
‘I was sick as a kid,’ she said. ‘My mother spent my childhood trying to fatten me up. I ran away from home to escape the egg custard.’ She glanced up at the skeletal horse, then at the sketch pad, flipping back through the pages to see what else was there—anything to avoid looking at him, betray her eagerness for him to draw her, sculpt her—and discovered that every page was filled with drawings of her. Far more than he could have done in a few minutes. ‘I don’t understand. You couldn’t have done all this today.’